Composition in the Intermediate Grades: How to Promote Thinking and Creativity.

Laney, James D.

Use of metacognitive strategies, creative problem solving, and creative thinking techniques in intermediate grade writing instruction can promote students' thinking and creativity. Metacognitive strategies can help students attack the writing task in an orderly fashion. Answering specific questions for descriptive, expository, narrative, or persuasive writing, for example, can help students shape their verbalizations before, during, and after writing paragraphs. Prewriting verbalizations and composition planning worksheets can substitute for the formal outline. Creative problem solving as applied to written composition involves such prewriting activities as stimulation, recreation of impressions, selection of a creative problem, peer group consultation, and oral brainstorming, while writing and rewriting include writing consultation and sharing writing with an appropriate audience. Creative thinking techniques such as brainstorming, attribute listing, morphological synthesis, and synectics methods can help writers supplement their store of intuitive ideas. (Appendixes include composition planning worksheets, a completed descriptive paragraph, and creative thinking worksheets.) (MM)